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On the twelfth they hanged five Sangleys, who were found guilty in the mutiny. On the fourteenth news came that all the people who were in the lancha that lost its course in Marianas had safely reached port in Cagayan. On the eighteenth the courier arrived with the mail. On the nineteenth the auditor Don Diego Calderon died.
It was a cessation of all sound, a silence as ominously complete as that of a summer woodland when a hawk soars overhead. Even the small light deep in the bottom of the first lancha tied to the landing-ladder had been suddenly quenched. Blake, staring apprehensively out into the gloom, caught the sound of a soft and feverish throbbing.
Being a little in the habit of speaking English, I entered into conversation with the captain, begging not to be taken to Nova Scotia, but to be put on shore on the neighbouring coast. While I endeavoured, in the cabin, to defend my own rights and those of the owner of the lancha, I heard a noise on deck. Something was whispered to the captain, who left us in consternation.
"How do I know that?" "You 'll have my word for it!" Tankred swung round on him. "D' you realize you 'll have to sneak ashore in a lancha and pass a double line o' patrol? And then crawl into a town that's reekin' with yellow-jack, a town you 're not likely to crawl out of again inside o' three months?" "I know all that!" acknowledged Blake.
He knew now that his movement had been seen and understood. He knew, too, as he saw the figure come scrambling out over the rocking boats, what capture would mean. He had the last strand of the rope severed before the Ecuadorean with the carbine reached the lancha next to him. He still felt, once he was free, that he could use his revolver and get away.
Anxious to reach Cumana, in order to avail ourselves of the first opportunity that might offer for our passage to Vera Cruz, we hired an open boat called a lancha, a sort of craft employed habitually in the latitudes east of Cape Codera where the sea is scarcely ever rough. Our lancha, which was laden with cacao, carried on a contraband trade with the island of Trinidad.
Then, too, many Cubanos have been seen about here lately, and they might molest us, while it is also nearly time for the Spanish lancha that patrols this coast at sunrise and sunset. So you see Disarm him!" This last was an order to two men who had moved noiselessly up behind Ridge while his attention was diverted by their leader.
He was a polite young man, and gave me hopes that the lancha, which was laden with cacao, would be given up, and that on the following day we might pursue our voyage. In the meantime he invited me to accompany him on board the sloop, assuring me that his commander, Captain Garnier, would furnish me with better accommodation for the night than I should find in the vessel from Halifax.
"I came to this place last evening," he said, "in the hope of getting a few shots at the Spanish lancha, which, as I told you, patrols the coast twice daily; for Spaniards have become so scarce of late, and confine themselves so closely to the larger towns, that it is sometimes difficult to maintain my record of one for each day." "What do you mean?" asked Ridge.
The soil is so fertile in the Golfo Triste, that maize yields two harvests in the year, and produces three hundred and eighty fold the quantity sown. Early in the morning we embarked in a sort of narrow canoe, called a lancha, in hopes of crossing the gulf of Cariaco during the day. The motion of the waters resembles that of our great lakes, when they are agitated by the winds.
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