The cab ride and train ride that night were happy rides. I had been a captive and now was free. The sights and sounds all around me took on a deeper purpose and a more significant meaning than they had ever borne before.
I had for a few brief days been a captive, shut out from nature's sights and sounds, and that brief deprivation awoke in me a feeling of appreciation for the feast that is everywhere around us spread with a lavish hand. My mind was in a tumult of delight, and I almost forgot I was a fugitive; fortunately the Spaniard is not a suspicious animal, and no notice was taken of us; and so we bumped slowly on southward through the tropic night.
Seven o'clock on the morning of the 11th found us at Guisa, a small station on the railroad about ninety miles from Havana and west from Cajio some twenty miles. Our friend here procured us horses, and, bidding him good-bye, Nunn and I started on our ride to Cajio. We were both greatly elated over the success of our adventure. Our friends had procured for us police passports and gun permits under the names of Parish and Ellis.
I had a chronometer, several valuable diamonds, a revolver and gun. Nunn carried a canvas bag containing, among other things, 250 capital cigars, tobacco, matches and 300 cartridges. Then we had good maps of the island and current charts of the Gulf of Mantabano, with its hundreds of rocky inlets, spreading everywhere along the south coast. But, armed as we were, it would never do to be picked up by any Spanish boat or patrol anywhere near the rebel border. It probably meant death if we were captured.
I think on the whole it would have been the wiser plan to have gone to Senor Andrez's plantation at San Jose. The fear in that case was that if an order arrived from Madrid to deliver me up I might not be safe even in the Isle of Pines. At Cajio I resolved to lose myself so far as the Spanish authorities were concerned, and only travel by night. If we remained on land this would be necessary, as soldiers were everywhere and our police passports would not hold good if we were found traveling in the direction of the rebel lines.
I proposed going by sea, and then all our voyaging would necessarily be by night, for there were Spanish gunboats everywhere patrolling around the shores, but there were innumerable small inlets where we could draw up our boat, lay perdu during the day and spy out the next island to sail to at night.
CASTS OF THE HEADS OF NOTORIOUS CRIMINALS.
We arrived in due time at Cajio, and here our passports were demanded by a little yellow monkey of a sergeant. I did not quite like having passports scrutinized and determined to try and avoid any more of it.
We found no boat at Cajio, nor could we buy, or, if we bought, could not manage one alone. The only thing we could do was to charter one with a crew of four men. During my stay in Cuba I had been studying Spanish. I had become a tolerably proficient speaker, so I had no great difficulty in associating with the natives.