It was proposed to spend a week on the island, and to take three days in going and coming. But if I went then I would be unable to sail on the steamer of the 25th, and would have to wait another week.
One day Gray brought Senor Andrez to dinner, along with a common friend, a Senor Alvarez. All three joined in imploring me to make one of the party, promising sport as novel as good; said the wild boars were plentiful; that we would have two days' shark fishing, turning turtles and hunting their eggs, and could vary it by a slave hunt, the jungle and some of the smaller islands being "full of runaways," and as they were by law wild beasts we might be lucky enough to shoot a few of them—shoot, not capture, as the planters knew that a runaway slave who had tasted the joys of freedom if caught was useless as a slave. So, as a matter of sport, as well as a warning to other slaves, they organized yearly hunts to bag a score or two. But so great is the depravity of the human heart that these wretches, in their desperate wickedness, objected to being shot, and at times were guilty of the enormity of shooting back again. History records how, on certain occasions, they did so with such good effect that the hunted became hunters; but these were rare events.
After long urging I consented. At the time there were only two short railways in all Cuba. We were to cross the island to the south coast, and there embark for the Isle of Pines in a boat owned by our host, which would be in waiting. The railway would take us to the little hamlet of San Felipe, some forty miles south, and there we were to take horses to the seaport town of Cajio. We were to start on Saturday, two days ahead. My wife did not relish my going, and I disliked it more than she did, but for totally different reasons. Mine were that, as a matter of prudence, I ought to recall my consent and remain in Havana until steamer day, and then sail without fail to Mexico. But fearing the ridicule of my friends, I went, persuading myself that there could be no danger and that everything in London was buried in so dense a fog bank that the detectives would struggle in vain to find a way out of it or any clue to our identity.
Had I known of the clever work of the Pinkerton brothers in London and the discoveries in Paris I should have been ill at ease; but had I known that Capt. John Curtin—then a member of the Pinkerton staff in New York, but now (1895.) of San Francisco—had with perfectly marvelous intuition and rare detective skill let daylight into the whole plot, and had reported to his chief that whenever F. A. Warren was discovered he would prove to be Austin Bidwell; I say if I had known this, instead of going off on a ten days' pleasure jaunt into an isolated corner of the world I should have taken instant flight, leaving Cuba, not by the usual modes of departure, but by sailing boat, and alone, for one of the Mexican ports.
Capt. Curtin had been detailed to work on the New York end of the case, to look for clues. It seemed a hopeless task. He is a warm friend of mine now, after twenty years, and has long forgiven me for the bullet I lodged in him in 1873. A few years after arresting me in the West Indies he went to San Francisco and started a private inquiry office of his own at 328 Montgomery street. When, after twenty years' incarceration, I arrived there one lovely May in 1892, he was waiting for me at the ferry, and gave me warm greetings, and as hearty congratulations, too, as any man could give another; then introduced me to his friends everywhere, and, in fact, from the hour of my arrival until my departure, three months afterward, was never tired of doing me a service and forwarding my business, so that by his kind offices I made a great success out of what, by reason of the great financial depression, might otherwise have proved a failure. But as Capt. Curtin, after effecting my arrest, having recovered from his wound, was one of the four who took me to England, I will wait until a later chapter to tell how it was he discovered my name and located me in Cuba.
On Saturday morning our party of four, accompanied by a following of black fellows and half a dozen dogs, set out by train. Before reaching San Felipe our bones had a shaking. The roadbed was execrable, the trucks of the cars were without springs, and to me it seemed as if we must leave the rails at any moment.
In Havana we regarded Don Andrez as a good fellow, but upon our arrival at San Felipe he had grown into a man of importance. When we came to Cajio he had grown into a person of distinction, and at the island he had swollen into a local Caesar. At San Felipe, a mere hamlet, horses were waiting for us and mules for the baggage, but before setting out we went to a nearby hacienda and sat down to what was simply the best lunch of which I ever partook.
The town was chiefly remarkable for the number of its fighting cocks. At the hacienda there were dozens, each in its separate compartment—regarded the same as horses and game dogs are in England and America—and half the black boys we met were carrying game birds.
At last, starting for Cajio, the road soon degenerated into a mere track, which led through some barren hills with scanty growths of a species of oak without underbrush, and here and there a sprinkling of cacti, and in the lower reaches between the hills grew dense green walls of Spanish bayonet.
We were crossing Cuba at its narrowest part, and from San Felipe to Cajio was only some thirty miles. After fifteen miles we came into the fertile coast belt and passed a number of deserted sugar plantations where tropic vegetation was trying to cover up the work of ruin wrought by man. Residences and sugar houses destroyed by fire were very much in evidence. To my surprise I learned that bodies of insurgents—who then held and had held for six years nearly the entire eastern province of Santiago de Cuba and Puerto Principe, and part of the extreme western province of Pinar del Rio—had only a few weeks before landed by night at the port La Playa de Batabano, fifteen miles away, and with the cry of "Free Cuba and death to the Spaniard!" had blotted out the town and then marched into the heart of the country, burning houses, killing the whites and calling upon the slaves to join them in freeing Cuba. Many did, and terrible were their excesses, and terribly did they pay for these. The Spanish soldiers and loyal Cuban volunteers closed in upon them, and at the little hamlet of San Marcos, where we halted and examined the too evident signs of the battle and massacre that followed, they made their last stand, but were no match for their well-armed and disciplined foes. After a desperate struggle they were overpowered, and every surviving soul was butchered by the infuriated soldiers. It was better so. Had they been spared it would have only been for the moment, for by official decree of the Captain-General of Cuba, indorsed by the Madrid Government, every inhabitant within the insurrectionary line, without regard to age or sex, was doomed to death without form of trial.