“Well, it doesn’t matter,” cried Poole, laughing. “Go on, father.”
“That’s what we are doing, my boy. But you go on with your breakfast, Mr Burnett, and make a good one while you have a chance. We may be getting news any minute that the gunboat is in sight; and if it is, there’s no knowing when we shall get a square meal again.”
“But whereabouts is this Oltec River, father?”
“Well, as near as I can tell you, my boy, it’s on the coast about thirty miles by sea from Velova, though only about half the distance through one of the mountain-passes by land. We ought to have been there now, and I dare say we should have been if Mr Burgess had not run us on to a rock. But that fellow going overboard quite upset my plans. It was a great nuisance, and I seemed to be obliged to heave-to, and wait to see if you people would come back on board.”
“Yes, father, I suppose so,” said Poole coolly.
“Done eating, you two?”
The lads both rose, and the whole party went on deck to scan their position, the lads finding the schooner gliding along southward before a pleasant breeze, while miles away on the starboard-bow a dim line marked the coast, which seemed rugged and broken up into mountain and vale; but there was no sign of gunboat nor a sail of any kind, and Poole breathed more freely.
“One’s so helpless,” he said to his companion, “on a coast like this, where one time you have a nice sailing wind, and the next hour it has dropped into a calm, so that a steamer has you quite at its mercy.”
“Yes,” said Fitz dryly; “but I don’t see that it matters when you have nothing on board but agricultural implements and chemical manures. What business is it of the gunboat?”
“Ah, what indeed?” cried Poole, laughing. “It’s a piece of impudence, isn’t it, to want to interfere! But I say, Burnett, what father says sounds well, doesn’t it—a hacienda at the mouth of a river, and a mountain-pass? That means going ashore and seeing something, if we are in luck. I do know that the country’s glorious here, from the peep or two I once had. My word! People think because you go sailing about the world you must see all kinds of wonders, when all the time you get a peep or two of some dirty port without going ashore, and all your travels are up and down the deck of your ship—and nothing else but sea.”