"Oh!" said Birbomono, with a grin, so soon as he was alone, "I do not know whether Señor don Stenio de Bejar will be pleased at seeing his wife escape in this way, when he felt so certain of holding her; poor señora! She is so good to us all, that it would be infamous to betray her, and then, after all, this is a good deed which brings me one thousand piastres," he added, rubbing his hands, "that is a very decent amount."
It was about eleven o'clock at night, all the lights in the hatto were extinguished by orders of the Major-domo, who had provided for everything; the slaves had been dismissed to their huts, and a solemn silence brooded over the landscape, a silence solely interrupted at regular intervals, by the sentries who challenged each other in a monotonous voice.
Don Sancho soon returned, accompanied by his sister, wrapped up like himself, in a long mantle.
Doña Clara did not speak, but on joining the Major-domo, she gracefully held out her right hand to him, on which he respectfully impressed his lips.
Although the officers had told the soldiers to keep a good guard, and watch carefully, not only the hatto, but its environs, the latter, slightly reassured by the darkness on one hand, and on the other, by the gloomy and mysterious depths of the forests that surrounded them, stood motionless behind the trees, contenting themselves with responding to the challenge, every half hour, but not venturing to go even a few yards from the shelter they had chosen.
The reasons for this apparent cowardice, were simple, and although we have explained them, we will repeat them here, for the sake of greater clearness.
In the early times of the buccaneers landing on Saint Domingo, the Fifties sent by the governor in pursuit of them, were armed with muskets; but after several encounters with the French, in which the latter gave them an awful thrashing, their terror of the adventurers became so great that, whenever they were sent on an expedition against these men, whom they almost regarded as demons, no sooner did they enter the forests, or the mountain gorges, or even the savannahs, where they might suppose the buccaneers to be ambushed, than they began to fire their pieces right and left, for the purpose of warning the enemies, and inducing them to withdraw.
The result of this clever manoeuvre was that the adventurers, thus warned, decamped in reality, and thus became intangible; the governor noticing this result, eventually guessed its cause, and hence, in order to avoid such a thing in future, he took the muskets away from the soldiers and substituted lances. This change, let us hasten to add, was not at all to the liking of these brave soldiers, who thus saw their ingenious scheme foiled, and were even more exposed to the blows of their formidable enemies.
It was almost without being obliged to take any other precaution than that of walking noiselessly and not speaking, that the Major-domo and the two persons he served as guide, succeeded in quitting the hatto on the opposite side to that on which the Fifties had established their bivouac.
Once the line of sentries was passed, the fugitives hurried on more rapidly, and soon reached a thicket in the midst of which three fully accoutred horses were so thoroughly hidden that unless known to be there, it would have been impossible to find them; for a greater precaution, and to prevent them from neighing, the Major-domo had fastened a cord round their nostrils.