“If we can get out of this beastly canefield.”
“I’ve found a way out, Mark. Finish your meal, and I’ll show you.”
Breakfast was speedily dispatched, and, having put on my boots, which were stiff and hard from the wetting received, and taken up my valise, I followed Alano to the extreme southwest end of the clearing. Here there was an ox-cart trail, leading in a serpentine fashion through the canefield to still higher ground. Beyond were the inevitable rocks and woods.
“We seem to have missed everything,” I said pointedly. “We have been lost several times, and even now we don’t know where we are.”
“We know we’re not sinking to the bottom of that sugar-cane field,” replied my Cuban chum grimly. “That’s something to be thankful for. Ah, look—there is quite a respectable-looking highway. Let us take to that and keep our eyes and ears open. It must lead to somewhere.”
We had reached the highway at right-angles, and now we pursued a course directly eastward, which we felt must bring us closer and closer to the vicinity of Guantanamo. I asked Alano if he recognized the country at all, but he shook his head.
“I was never out in this direction,” he explained. “My journeys have always been from Guantanamo to Santiago by water.”
As we progressed we passed several isolated huts, and then a village containing perhaps a score of dwellings. The separate huts were deserted without exception, but in the village we came across three tall and bony colored women, who eyed us with great suspicion.
Alano began to open a friendly conversation in Spanish with them, and offered to pay them well if they would get us up a good dinner. But this they could not do, for there was little to be had outside of some vegetables. They said they had had some meat, but it had all been confiscated by the soldiers who had passed through only the evening before.
“She means a body of Spanish soldiers,” said Alano, after some more talk with the oldest of the women. “She says there were about a hundred of them on horseback, and they were following up a detachment of General Garcia’s volunteers.”