IN A LONELY SPOT.
The dark night happily favoured them; and what was also in their favour was the fact that Sieur Simon's boat lay at anchor, and his hoys had been plying backwards and forwards all the afternoon, making the men on guard pay but little attention to the gentle plash of the oars as Andreas and Harry sent the long boat shooting off into the bay. One thought distressed the faithful Andreas: he had done his best to lay in a store of food, but he knew it was a very inadequate provision if the boys were to be left long in the desert island.
No one spoke for some time; then, when they had safely passed the ship, and were well out to sea, they had plenty to say to each other. Harry told how he had heard the baying of the dogs from his hiding-place; how they had come nearer and nearer, and he had felt a strange horror, which nothing else had ever given him before, at the idea of being torn in pieces by those blood-thirsty animals; then how the sounds had told him the dogs were close at hand, the shouting and yelling negroes urging them on, and the pirates mingling oaths with these cries as they were entangled in the scrub or the mangrove branches. Yes, and at last they had come close by, up to the foot of the tree, and had paused there as the baying dogs rushed round and round undecided, till one of them had evidently scented out the trail made by Andreas, and the negroes had hunted the dogs forward. Harry's face as he told the story still bore traces of the terrible ordeal he had passed through during those few moments of intense suspense.
'I fancied before that I was brave, but I only know that when I heard those evil beasts I had no more courage left in me than a zany at a village fair; and when they had passed by, I lay on the floor of my hiding-place as if I were already dead. I have never before been in such dire terror of my life; but in truth such barbarous ways are not honest warfare.'
'Yet I saw my father hunted down by wild dogs,' said Andreas, on whom this fact had made a lasting impression; and Carlo looked grave, for he knew well enough that his people it was who had perpetrated such cruelties on the gentle Indians, and that Spain would ever have to bear the shame of the first cruelties in the New World--cruelties which other nations had not been slow to adopt; till the black plague-spot had spread all over the fair lands and the newly discovered islands.
All night they rowed hard, and when daylight came, and with it all the glory of the tropical sunrise, St. Catherine was no longer in sight; and unless any other knew the secret of the desert island and betrayed the knowledge to Sieur Simon, they were saved. Each in his own heart thanked God.
Harry's face began to recover its more cheerful expression: he was not leaving his loved ones as was Carlo; but was this journey bringing him much nearer his own home?
'When shall we sight this place?' asked Carlo wearily, when the sun beating down on their heads reminded him that he was now not nearly as strong as before his illness; 'and what do you call it, Andreas? It seems as if we were going to a land of nowhere.'
'It has no name known to the white men, Señor; but my father, who took me there when I was a boy, always called it by an Indian name which meant "Queen of the Water," because of the one tall Jagua palm-tree which stands high and solitary on it, and can be seen from a long distance.'
'Then we are already in sight,' said Harry suddenly. 'Look, Andreas, there, right ahead! You have come straight as an arrow.'