"If there had been nobody round he would have done so, but how far he'd have gone then is another question. He probably knows that nigger stockades are apt to get blown up when a white man disappears, and it's quite likely his nerve would have failed him. Any way, he's hanging out at a village up the creek, and we'll probably go round to-morrow with some giant powder and make a protest. In the meanwhile, I don't know any reason why you shouldn't go to sleep again."
Austin went back with him to the house beneath the bridge, and, though it was not perceptibly cooler, found sleep come to him. His vague apprehensions had vanished in the face of a definite peril.
CHAPTER XIII
TOIL
A faint light was creeping into the skipper's room when Austin awakened, and, seeing his comrade's berth unoccupied, went out on deck. The swamps were wrapped in woolly vapour, and a column of dingy smoke went up straight and unwavering from the funnel of the locomotive boiler. The hot land breeze had died away, and it would be some time yet before that from the sea set in. In the meanwhile it was almost cool, and very still; so still, in fact, that Austin was startled when a flock of parrots, invisible in the mist, swept past, screaming, overhead.
Then the sounds of man's activity suddenly commenced, for there was a clatter forward where the Spaniards flung the loose covers from the hatch, and a harsh rattle of chain mingled with the soft patter of their naked feet. In another few moments a sharp, musical clinking broke out, and Austin saw Tom, who had served as a steamer's donkey-man, straighten his bent back when a rush of white vapour whirled with a strident hissing about the locomotive boiler, which now drove the winch. He grinned at Austin, and glanced at the misty creek, far down which a faint screaming was dying away.
"Those parrots must be —— silly things," he said. "What d' they want to live here for when they can fly?"
Austin, who decided that there was some reason in the query, strolled round the house, and came upon Jefferson sitting with his back to it and the box of dynamite on the deck in front of him. He looked gaunter and more haggard than ever in the daylight, but he was busy pinching down a copper cap upon a strip of snaky fuse, which he proceeded to carefully embed in a roll of semi-plastic material that looked very like a candle made of yellow wax.
"What are you doing?" asked Austin.
"Nipping on a couple of detonators," said Jefferson. "Stand clear of the one on the deck. They're lined with mercury fulminate, and you want to take your shoes off when you come near that. Giant powder's innocent by comparison. I mean to try a stick or two of this consignment."