Last of this troop came some inferior officer, also in his chair, who, as he went slowly up the hill, with his face turned toward the gang which followed, drew every other second the cigar from his lips, to inspirit them with those ejaculations which earned for the Spaniards of the sixteenth century the uncharitable imputation of being the most abominable swearers of all Europeans.
“The blasphemous dog!” said Yeo, fumbling at his bowstring, as if he longed to send an arrow through him. But Amyas had hardly laid his finger on the impatient veteran’s arm, when another procession followed, which made them forget all else.
A line of Indians, Negroes, and Zambos, naked, emaciated, scarred with whips and fetters, and chained together by their left wrists, toiled upwards, panting and perspiring under the burden of a basket held up by a strap which passed across their foreheads. Yeo’s sneer was but too just; there were not only old men and youths among them, but women; slender young girls, mothers with children running at their knee; and, at the sight, a low murmur of indignation rose from the ambushed Englishmen, worthy of the free and righteous hearts of those days, when Raleigh could appeal to man and God, on the ground of a common humanity, in behalf of the outraged heathens of the New World; when Englishmen still knew that man was man, and that the instinct of freedom was the righteous voice of God; ere the hapless seventeenth century had brutalized them also, by bestowing on them, amid a hundred other bad legacies, the fatal gift of negro-slaves.
But the first forty, so Amyas counted, bore on their backs a burden which made all, perhaps, but him and Yeo, forget even the wretches who bore it. Each basket contained a square package of carefully corded hide; the look whereof friend Amyas knew full well.
“What’s in they, captain?”
“Gold!” And at that magic word all eyes were strained greedily forward, and such a rustle followed, that Amyas, in the very face of detection, had to whisper—
“Be men, be men, or you will spoil all yet!”
The last twenty, or so, of the Indians bore larger baskets, but more lightly freighted, seemingly with manioc, and maize-bread, and other food for the party; and after them came, with their bearers and attendants, just twenty soldiers more, followed by the officer in charge, who smiled away in his chair, and twirled two huge mustachios, thinking of nothing less than of the English arrows which were itching to be away and through his ribs. The ambush was complete; the only question how and when to begin?
Amyas had a shrinking, which all will understand, from drawing bow in cold blood on men so utterly unsuspicious and defenseless, even though in the very act of devilish cruelty—for devilish cruelty it was, as three or four drivers armed with whips, lingered up and down the slowly staggering file of Indians, and avenged every moment’s lagging, even every stumble, by a blow of the cruel manati-hide, which cracked like a pistol-shot against the naked limbs of the silent and uncomplaining victim.
Suddenly the casus belli,[186-8] as usually happens, arose of its own accord.