Now it saw in this shouting, gesticulating youth a closer victim of their sport.
“Swim!” jeered one low-browed, dirty Spaniard.
To this came an echoing shout of:
“Make him swim!”
“Yes! Throw the Yankee dog into the harbor. He will find company in the sailors of the Maine!”
A yell went up—a yell that was partly derisive and partly defiant.
It had one effect that the victim was quick to notice—it utterly drowned out his appealing shouts to those on the deck of the Fern, causing him to gasp:
“Am I the only American left behind in Havana?”
It looked like it.
Further from the pier, nearer every moment to the entrance of Havana harbor went the Fern, the last of the United States steamers to leave Cuba’s capital city on that memorable afternoon of the ninth of April, 1898.