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There were Americans on shore who had crossed over from Vera Cruz for the purpose of taking this steamer. It would be a month before there would be another one, and then there would be no certainty of their getting aboard of that. The captain held a consultation of the passengers, who all decided to have them come on board.
'All our advantages were well-nigh lost by a report which spread through the garrison when our firing ceased. A cry arose that our chief was killed, and that as the English who had taken the town were marching upon La Laguna, they must be intercepted at the cuesta, or hill, behind Santa Cruz. It is easy to conceive what a panic such rumours would cause among badly armed and half-drilled militia.
The next morning there were no horses to be found; and it was not till the afternoon that I procured a cart and a couple of carabaos to take me to Santa Cruz, whence in the evening the market-vessel started for Manila. One carabao was harnessed in front; the other was fastened behind the cart in order that I might have a change of animals when the first became tired.
At that date there was no public house or tavern in San Jose where we could stop, so we started toward Santa Cruz and encamped about ten miles out, to the west of the town, where we fell in with another party of explorers, of whom Ruckel, of San Francisco, was the head; and after supper, as we sat around the camp-fire, the conversation turned on quicksilver in general, and the result of the contest in San Jose in particular.
Yet the distance from her great eastern port, Vera Cruz, to the old Spanish treasure-depot, Acapulco, on the western coast, was not, as the bird flies, more than three hundred miles: a distance scarcely greater than that from Boston to New York, and which, with modern means of transit, might be traversed between sunrise and sunset.
I pictured the flagship of Admiral Fletcher with its fine cargo of sturdy young marines, riding serenely at anchor off Vera Cruz, and those aboard the vessel utterly unmindful of the message that was now on its way through the air, an ominous message which to some of them would be a portent of death. When the President concluded his conversation with me his voice was husky.
'In the Santa Cruz Group, S.W. Pacific: September 19. 'The "Moral Dynamic " and the latter book are indeed the very books I have longed to see; books that one can put with confidence and satisfaction into the hands of men, young and old, in these stirring and dangerous times. 'Then it did me good to be recalled to old scenes and to dream of old faces.
His reverence had none of the Santa Cruz in him; he was a gentle, zealous, studious clergyman, yet was filled with the purest enthusiasm for the cause of what he regarded as legitimacy. The Don Carlos who raised the standard in 1833, he maintained, was the rightful heir to the throne of Spain.
And presently, as the sun rose higher, all the tropic region of the coast and the brown walls of Vera Cruz and of its outpost fort of San Juan de Ulua were flooded with brilliant light which sudden and glorious outburst of radiant splendor seemed to me to be charged with a bright promise of my own success.
On the following night they were the theme of comment in the house of Orenda, a rich jewel merchant in the industrious district of Santa Cruz, and the numerous friends of the family gave attention to nothing else.
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